Nirobi National Park (Last Day)

Because of our flight schedule, we booked the very nice Nairobi Serena hotel for an extra night and had a full day to stay in Nairobi. Nairobi had a beautiful park next to our hotel and an impressive downtown with many tall buildings. We didn’t spend much time exploring the city but on the last day we rented a taxi for the day at a very reasonable price to take in a few unique attractions.

We first visited the David Shendrik centre, an orphanage for elephant and rhino calves from all over Kenya. We loved the baby rhino just as much as he loved the crowd. He ran along the restraining rope brushing against every one he could. So close, he stepped on Christie’s foot. She now tells everyone that she was trampled by a rhino! An older black rhino released previously in the adjacent park still comes back for the daily feeding, so we finally got to see a black rhino! Little did we know that we would see a couple of the in the wild later that day.

We spent most of the day on our taxi safari in Nairobi National Park. Despite its’s location adjacent to Nairobi and relative small size for a national park (117 sq.km) Nairobi National Park boasts a large and varied wildlife population. Migrating gather in the park during the dry season and it is one of Kenya's most successful rhinoceros sanctuaries. We started slow but ended up seeing a lot of wildlife including elands and finally, black rhinos in the wild. We spotted a mother and calf and were able to get ahead of them for an identification and quick picture of the running off.

While both black and white rhino’s are classified as endangered, the numbers of black rhinos are failing. They have dropped from a total number of at least 100 000 in 1960, spread across most of Africa south of the Sahara Desert, to today with fewer than 3,500 black rhino left. The black rhino is extremely fast and agile although it looks heavy and slow, and can make sharp turns even when running at their top speed of more than 50 km/hr.* They are quite shy as these exhibited, when running away from us even at a distance.

The last stop was at the Carnivore, a restaurant that serves a variety of meat such as lamb, pork, beef, crocodile, spare ribs, sausages, and our favourite, Ostrich balls (ground meat). We then travelled to the airport, gave the cab driver all our unused African currency and flew off to home. I really missed my wife!